Don McCullin: Proximity

To coincide with the major retrospective at Tate Britain (5th February – 6th May 2019), Hamiltons will be celebrating Sir Don McCullin’s lifetime achievement and decades of collaboration with Hamiltons by exhibiting rare and unseen vintage prints dating back to the 1950s.

Selected from the photographer’s personal archive, they were made shortly after the photographs were first taken on assignments around the world. Intimate and physically modest, the prints provide access to events witnessed and recorded by a photojournalist working on the frontline of multiple, international flashpoints from Vietnam to Cyprus. Largely produced for a photo editor or agency in a pre-digital age, these historic prints have been visibly put to work and bear the physical marks of their use. In these pictures, McCullin shares the telling details of a human face or the gestures of a hand.  As he earns his subjects’ trust, he communicates their crisis. To comprehend each remarkable scene, the viewer is pulled in tight as if we are standing beside McCullin in proximity to an anxious soldier, a pointed gun or a grieving wife.